How Cubans' Travel Rattles the Regime

To persuade the world it is reforming, the regime lets more people travel. What they say isn't reassuring.

By

Mary Anastasia O'Grady

March 3, 2013 5:34 pm ET

Cubans have been prohibited from traveling abroad legally for more than five decades. Recently, the Castro regime decided to issue travel permits as part of an effort to convince the world that the country's promised reform agenda is real. That decision is now seriously complicating Cuba's attempt at an image makeover.

The trouble is that the more Cubans travel, the clearer it becomes to the wider world that life on the island is primitive and degrading and changing hardly at all.

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